February 10, 2011

Marco: Why The Daily Is So Yesterday

... it’s weird to me, as a long-time internet-only news reader, to pay money for a bunch of content I don’t care about. More than half of each issue is sports news, entertainment gossip, ads, and little newspaper games (crosswords, Sudoku, horoscopes), and I need to buy all of that to get the news, editorials, and app reviews that I care about.

Marco's point is oft-repeated but so important that it cannot be repeated enough. Successful media products — Tivo, iTunes, BitTorrent, Instapaper, Twitter, Facebook and so on — enable people to see only what they want and cut away the rest.

If you are asking your audience to consume something they don't want to, you better stop or they won't be your audience anymore. And if you're asking them to pay for it, that's an uphill battle to say the least. The Daily appears to be run by the extremist Gutenbourgeois, as described by Paul Ford in his masterpiece The Web Is a Customer Service Medium.

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